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Comments: 206 +- Science: Lawmakers Voice Support For NASA Moon Program on Friday September 18, @08:33AM
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Matt_dk writes "Members of a key Congressional committee on Tuesday voiced support for NASA's Constellation program, designed to get astronauts back to the moon. The comments came a week after an expert panel said NASA's plans were not possible, given its current budget. The occasion was an appearance by Norman Augustine, head of a committee formed to consider the future of human space exploration. The Augustine committee sent a summary report to the White House last week saying NASA needs at least an extra $3 billion a year to implement the Constellation moon program. The report also included several alternatives to that program. At a feisty session on Tuesday, Congress was having none of those alternatives, starting just minutes into the two-hour hearing."
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Talk is cheap (Score:5, Insightful)
"Voicing support" doesn't mean jack squat. Put your money where your mouth is or sit down. For WAY too many years now, Congress and various presidential administrations have "voiced supprt for NASA and made grand promises about building moon bases, going to Mars, etc. But they've turned around and quietly kept the same anemic budget that's been in place since Nixon axed their budget after Apollo. And, for all the grand promises, all NASA has actually delivered were a few probes, a low orbit space station, and a "reusable" spacecraft that can only go into low orbit and has to be rebuilt after each mission. Politicians have coasted on bullshit promises for decades now, and NASA has been all too willing to go along with it.
This committee report is the first time that someone has so publicly pointed out what should have been obvious for a long time now--that NASA isn't going ANYWHERE on the current budget. So either give them the budget they need or own up to the fact that the era of manned space exploration is over. Either way, stop wasting resources on money sinks like the ISS and a pointless shuttle program. They're little more than giant PR programs.
Re:Talk is cheap (Score:5, Insightful)
You do realize that:
1) The ISS is an international cooperation, an important starting point for manned deep space exploration as the cost will be prohibitive for any single nation? The PR it's worth isn't in the public eye, it's in the eyes of the nations that the US will have to ally itself with in space if it has any hope of getting a more permanent place in space.
2) The shuttle program is done, with the shuttles expected to be retired in 2010, and that they've been working on a replacement for the shuttle for 10 years, though the short-term solution seems to be to use Soyuz capsules for manned launches? Suggesting that they get rid of the shuttle because it's a load of bullshit promises and tired old technology is a bit redundant when the shuttle has less than a year left before it's permanently grounded.
Talk *is* cheap. And I honestly don't think that the US government has the stomach for space exploration any more. The people certainly don't... space is a hostile environment. If you feel that any loss of life is completely unacceptable, you'll never get out there, because the environment itself will kill you if you give it a chance. Take every precaution to avoid losing people, but understand and accept that every time you strap yourself to a rocket and blast into space, you're taking risks with your life. It's that 2nd part that the people at large don't seem to understand, and that's why every time there's an accident and somebody dies, the space program loses support.
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Re:Talk is cheap (Score:5, Informative)
Talk *is* cheap. And I honestly don't think that the US government has the stomach for space exploration any more. The people certainly don't... space is a hostile environment. If you feel that any loss of life is completely unacceptable, you'll never get out there, because the environment itself will kill you if you give it a chance.
What makes you think the American people feel that any loss of life is completely unacceptable? Most of the polls that I saw following the Columbia disaster showed an increase in support for the space program. I don't think the American people have a problem with the fact that space flight is an inherently dangerous activity. They do have a problem when incompetence leads to fatalities (who cares what the engineers say about the temperature and o-rings? let's launch!) but there's never been a majority of Americans that would scrap the whole program over them.
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Talk *is* cheap. And I honestly don't think that the US government has the stomach for space exploration any more. The people certainly don't... space is a hostile environment. If you feel that any loss of life is completely unacceptable, you'll never get out there, because the environment itself will kill you if you give it a chance.
What makes you think the American people feel that any loss of life is completely unacceptable? Most of the polls that I saw following the Columbia disaster showed an increase in support for the space program. I don't think the American people have a problem with the fact that space flight is an inherently dangerous activity. They do have a problem when incompetence leads to fatalities (who cares what the engineers say about the temperature and o-rings? let's launch!) but there's never been a majority of Americans that would scrap the whole program over them.
I agree that most Americans don't care about the loss of life. What we do care about is "wasting" money. It sounds horrible but that's America. And, so, I think many, many people in America think human space exploration is a waste of money at this time. Of course, I'm sure the general contractors in these congressional districts feel differently and that's why you are hearing so much noise about it in Congress right now. As usual what happens in Congress has nothing to do with what the people that elec
Re:Talk is cheap (Score:5, Interesting)
The oceans are also a hostile environment. Yet we designed a submarine for about $6B and currently buy new ones (1 a year at the moment) for under $3B each. When was the last time the nuclear Navy has had an accident? That would be the USS Scorpion in 1968. Only twice in the history of the nuclear Navy has there been accidents resulting in the loss of life, both in the '60's. The Navy also has many more platforms, operate far more frequently, and are designed and built (nuclear construction too) for less than NASA wants to go to the moon. NASA needs to trim the fat and improve safety if that want to keep support levels high.
You also say that you take a risk every time you strap yourself to a rocket and blast into space. Well you also take a risk every time you strap your self to a car, get on a bike, bus, train, etc. But you have to trust that things have been designed properly and the operator is paying attention to what they're doing. If you want a life without risk, good luck finding it. The key is to make sure the proper steps are taken to mitigate those risks.
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Re:Talk is cheap (Score:5, Insightful)
But there's an important difference between space and the deep ocean. The energetic cost of getting a kilo of payload into space are several orders of magnitude larger than they are for getting the equivalent payload size into the deep ocean. Because of this we can afford to overbuild and over-engineer submersibles in a way that we cannot possibly hope to do for space vehicles where every gram costs us dearly. As a result, any space vehicle of a reasonable cost (read billions rather than trillions) will be inherently more risky, because it will be, by comparison with the submersible, built to the absolute minimum engineering tolerances for strength, durability, etc., Basically, anything that adds weight will be built to the absolute minimum tolerance on a space vehicle. A submersible will be significantly overbuilt for hull strength, resistance to pressure, etc. because the cost of moving this extra weight around under water is much, much lower, than the cost of sending the equivalent extra weight into orbit.
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Re:Talk is cheap (Score:5, Insightful)
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Emphasize the danger.
Right on. The American public really isn't anti-danger, look at NASCAR.
It's good for society to have dangerous hobbies and send their bravest souls into danger. That way the rest of the population can live vicariously through them. It's either that, or start a war or two every now and then. Imagine the resource of the latest war were spent on space exploration. We'd have a space elevator by now.
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Imagine the resource of the latest war were spent on space exploration. We'd have a space elevator by now.
Or, for the cost of 57 days of the war, we could have had a launch loop [wikipedia.org], which would be cheaper, wouldn't expose passengers to anywhere near as much radiation, and wouldn't require unobtanium.
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There's a very good reason to think in terms of manned deep space exploration: manned deep space colonization. Something about putting all your eggs in one basket. If something happens to this planet, or this solar system, we're screwed. Now, we're a long way away from being interstellar, but we should at least start trying to be interplanetary now.
Manned space exploration isn't about the human gathering inf
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Either way, stop wasting resources on money sinks like the ISS and a pointless shuttle program. They're little more than giant PR programs.
That's extremely unfair. The shuttle hasn't lived up to it's original billing (cheap, reusable) or flown as many flights as was envisioned but to claim it's nothing more than a giant PR program is rather dismissive of everything that it has accomplished. No shuttle == no hubble repair mission == no hubble for the last 15 years.
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Stopping such programs will make them that much harder to start again. If you say Lets stop the ISS and shuttle program then when it come back to a point where Man space travel looks more promising then they will go well look at earlier 21st century we canceled Man Space Flight because it was a wast of resources why should we start it again. Vs keeping it on life support right now so when if/when interest kicks back up it will be an easier sell to just raise the budget.
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Yep, and the backlash [csmonitor.com] has already started.
Re:Talk is cheap (Score:5, Insightful)
I know its in vogue to bash the Shuttle and ISS but you really need to do some research. They both have their problems but they are far from being pointless. At the most basic level the ISS has taught us how to design and build a large structure that needs to be assembled in space. Future long term missions require this domain knowledge. The most Apollo era technology achieved was very basic two-craft docking (Apollo CM-LM, Apollo-Soyuz, Apollo CM-Skylab). The ISS is also what has enabled the private manned launch industry. SpaceX would have nowhere to go and nothing to do if it weren't for the ISS. The ISS can house and bus experiments that aren't tied to a single manned mission meaning extremely long term experiments can be run without needing to design and build a new long duration spacecraft. The Space Shuttle despite its flaws can lift twenty tons of cargo the size of a school bus along with seven astronauts in a single launch. No other current or past spacecraft can boast that capability. This capability allowed the Shuttle to launch satellites, perform five Hubble servicing missions, perform dozens of SpaceLab missions, and build the ISS.
You talk about LEO like getting there is a bad thing. LEO is a great place to do space science without getting your crew killed. LEO has the benefit of Earth's magnetic field which protects astronauts from heavy doses of solar radiation. The presence of the magnetic field obviates some amount of shielding a manned mission might otherwise need which means more spacecraft mass can be dedicated to experimentation. It's also much cheaper (relatively speaking) to get a lot of mass into LEO than it is into other orbits. Getting something the size of the Space Shuttle into a MEO or GEO would be extremely difficult to do with a single launch. The LEO environment is then a great place to perform long duration manned missions to figure out how the hell to keep a crew alive and sane on a mission to Mars or a NEO. LEO is also a good place to learn and practice techniques for building things reliably in space. We're learning how to get a crew to Mars or a NEO by orbiting "pointlessly" in LEO, the skills learned in orbit will be useful on NEO and Mars missions. The altitude of the orbit isn't quite as important as the skills learned while you were there.
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"support" is an interesting term (Score:3, Interesting)
mismatch between the task to be performed and the funds that are available to support those tasks
And congress reject this. They call this "voicing support?" Sounds like a death sentence to the higher-ups at NASA to me...
Bush mandated a moon shot (Score:5, Informative)
and utterly failed to provide funding for it. Its no wonder that NASA does not have enough money to complete the project. If this results in a funding increase for NASA, it will be a start. Even if it is only a tiny baby step.
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To be fair, there is that little matter of paying for the invasion and occupation of a foreign country for political purposes.
After all, if you're going to spend a trillion dollars sending troops overseas to nation build, that does tend to put a crimp in the budgets of other projects.
"the future of human space exploration" (Score:3, Interesting)
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Just get on with it (Score:3, Interesting)
Well I'm glad they said it. We can frig around with this platform or that platform based on the merits of xyz and sure direct is probably a better launcher and solid fuel launchers are probably bad but haven't we learned the lessons from scraping the Saturn V launchers yet?
Pick a platform, with all it warts, short of fundamental design flaws, and keep developing it.
I think the 747 was being developed around the same time as the Saturn V launchers, look how far it has come. Imagine if Boeing decided to chuck all that development work away and start again - they'd be bankrupt.
Time to get on with it.
Military budget is... (Score:5, Informative)
$636B. [wikipedia.org] More than the sum of ALL OTHER COUNTRIES combined.
This is like walking around with $600 in your pocket and giving a bum on the street $3.
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That's sort of irrelevant. (Score:3, Insightful)
and it has no real effect on NASA's budget (Score:2)
if anything it furthers space technology more than it hinders it.
We also spend more on new buildings/bridges/parks named after living government officials than on NASA.
Does NASA get votes?
Answer that and you have found the real reason.
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More than the sum of ALL OTHER COUNTRIES combined.
What's your point? We could spend the money in other ways? Yeah, maybe. Unless the world destabilized and we had to step in at a later date and spend even more money to pick up the pieces.
This is like walking around with $600 in your pocket and giving a bum on the street $3.
So NASA is a homeless bum in your world view? Maybe we should tell them to get a job ;)
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What's your point? We could spend the money in other ways? Yeah, maybe. Unless the world destabilized and we had to step in at a later date and spend even more money to pick up the pieces.
Yes. Because a) the US stepping in to other countries in order to stabilize things has worked so very well so far, and b) no other nations could possibly work together with the US to address international issues in a multilateral way.
And this is ignoring the fact that the US military blows obscene amounts of money on poi
Re:Military budget is... (Score:5, Informative)
What's your point? We could spend the money in other ways?
The Apollo program was nothing more than a pissing match. We tossed 13 years we dumped $145B (in 2008 $). That's $11B a year, or $8B more than we're spending now.
Imagine if we spent $600B PER YEAR on finding alternative energy. Imagine if we spent $600B in one year on NASA. We'd be at Mars within 5 years. We slapsticked the Moon mission together in, what now looks like record time.
Universal health care would cost an estimate $70B. $70. For ~1/10th of what we spend blowing people up we could give every man woman and child in America full health care.
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Re:Military budget is... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not debating that health care in this country is a cluster fuck. I'm not debating that it's over priced and that it's being fucked up by bureaucracies.
I'm just saying. Even with all those problems we could easily toss a fraction of spending we spend on the military and do it.
And they went from 0 to the moon in 8 years. 8 years. Before the internet. Before CAD/CAM. Before software simulation. It used to take my company almost a decade to design a new product. You'd have to draft everything by hand. I guess we used to employ a courier service to go between our buildings and do nothing but carry drawings. Even then it'd take a day or two sometimes for another division to get them and change them and send them back.
I don't think 5 years is unreasonable if we threw our unconditional support behind it.
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Re:Military budget is... (Score:4, Insightful)
Not quite. You need to give that bum on the street some more credentials... he's living from meal to meal, and sometimes goes 2 or 3 days between chances to eat. Oh, and he's a former Nobel laureate, and invented things like Velcro and Kevlar, without which the military's equipment wouldn't be anywhere near as effective as it is....
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I've given money to panhandlers plenty of times
I don't carry cash. I bet the advent of widespread debit/credit card use has really put a crimp in the panhandler lifestyle. I keep waiting to run into one with a credit card machine.
In any event, it's much more fun to tell them to get a job when they beg for money. This will generate a reaction ranging from "fuck you" to just walking away. If you are lucky they will try to take a swing at you and you can test out your new taser ;)
Seriously (Score:2, Insightful)
But doesn't the federal government have more pressing issues at this time than building a Motel 6 on the moon?
P.S. Don't take the last sentence literally, please.
$12 trillion (Score:4, Insightful)
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on a related note (Score:3, Interesting)
Could the ISS use excess electricity from the solar panels along with a tether to maintain altitude?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tether_propulsion [wikipedia.org]
The basic idea is you drag the tether through earth's magnetic field. If you pull power off of it, your orbit lowers. If you run energy back through it, your orbit rises.
My only guess is they don't have a lot of excess capacity on the ISS and so lack the power to run with this.
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They have the spare power - they don't have the luxury of being able to remain in one attitude long enough for the tether to make a difference. (Not to mention that many of the engineering aspects of tether propulsion remain elusive and unsolved.)
Why don't people listen to experts? (Score:5, Interesting)
As a result I think that good public policy would tell us that there needs to be a compelling reason to scrap what we've invested our time and money in over the past several years.
Compelling? Like an expert panel saying 'this won't work'? What's the point of assembling experts to make recommendations if we're not going to listen to them. I can't say I didn't expect it, but I think it's just pathetic that there apparently wasn't any serious discussion of the alternatives. There may be benefits to going back to the moon, but most of what I've read lately leans toward "I want to relive the glory days when space was new."
If this finally gets somebody to throw NASA some more funding, then I suppose that's something, but the cost of manned missions is staggering. There's so much interesting and useful science that could be done without having to spend (waste?) resources on consumables and redundant systems for supporting life.
I actually had high hopes that someone would listen to the recommendations... Reminds me of a poker player that doesn't know how to fold a hand. Sure, we have a chance to get something out of it, but I don't see that the pot odds [wikipedia.org] are not worth it for manned missions right now.
(Sorry for the poker stuff... no car analogy came to mind)
Terrible timing (Score:2, Insightful)
We do not have the money (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iWWPT8cAUpUCsmOZoABze-6XhwTAD9ALBNU00
We're in the deepest recession since 1930, and have run up $1.38 Trillion in debt, people- and that's not all from the two wars we're fighting.
The administration is forecasting a $9 Trillion budget deficit [nytimes.com] within ten years, a figure the Congressional Budget Office agrees with.
"Only $3BN more" you say? That's a +15% increase of NASA's budget. "Oh, only 15%", you say. Well, guess what happens after 1000 federal agencies and projects have come to you asking for "only 15% more"? I can't even find a figure for the number of items in the federal budget, but I'm guessing it falls around 10,000 or more.
Yes, military spending is an order of magnitude larger. That is not an excuse to increase spending for another agency; it is a reason to reduce military spending. That is something that is not easily done, given how dependent our country has become on military spending to employ people, and congresscritters are very allergic to "defense" cuts in their district.
We need to be trimming from the federal budget, not adding to it any more, except for the most critical needs. Space exploration, while fascinating and a great boost for nationalism, is not a critical need.
Stay rational (Score:3, Insightful)
A reasonable military budget keeps us safe. A massive military budget makes us look for reasons to us it, involves us in foreign wars, and sinks our economy under a burden of debt.
What you really want, if you're frightened "Ali Kaboom", as you put it, is a massive intelligence budget and an intelligence system run by practical people willing to include talent wherever it exists. Then you add on top of that a military with enough punch to make people hurt if we find out something we don't like.
That's a lot
If we could only get the gov't out of the way... (Score:2)
... we'd be on our way to the libertarian paradise in space. Riiight. Dude, don't you understand how this works? The reason we're not doing "long-term settlement" on the moon is that there's absolutely, positively no way to make money at it. If there were, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and all the other usual suspects would just buy themselves some senators, get the government out of their way, and go do it. But the fact is that getting to the moon at all is astronomically (pun intended) expensive. Get
Re:If we could only get the gov't out of the way.. (Score:4, Insightful)
People who keep making this argument need to face the fact that there's a reason that private companies aren't going to the moon (or into space in general). It's not because the government is stopping them - if there was money to be made, big companies would route around the government. The problem is that there's no money in it.
There was no money in the internet either until the 1990s. I guess building it before then was a waste of time and money.
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Re:If we could only get the gov't out of the way.. (Score:5, Insightful)
And who was developing the Internet until the 1990's? The government. Specifically, DARPA and NSF. And a bunch of universities, probably funded by government grants.
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No, I don't think business will jump in with both feet. I never said anything of the sort. All I think is that gutting the manned space program is incredibly short-sighted. There will come a day when spaceflight is profitable. That could be tomorrow if we discover some rare and profitable material (not likely), it could be within our lifetimes (somewhat more likely) or it could come afterwards. Either way, I think it's in our long term interest to do everything we can to develop space flight technologi
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>>>If there were, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and all the other usual suspects...
They can't. These companies are BANNED from creating interplanetary ventures. The law allows them to send-up satellites, but it's illegal for them to do any other space-based entrepreneurship. The government has assigned that market to NASA as a monopoly, just like the old East India Trading Company had been granted a monopoly by the crown.
What we need to do is repeal that law, open Moon and Mars development
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Yes... and how does the main character do it? By lying and pretending there's something on the moon worth going there for (in this case, diamonds).
The lesson: The only way you'll convince people or businesses that going to the moon is even remotely worth the trouble is by lying through your teeth.
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He also used a number of other tricks, such as leaking the fact that he was going to draw the Coco-Cola logo on the moon and then getting Pepsi to pay him not to (and, thus, win a lot of free publicity over the fact that they'd bought the advertising rights to the moon and were not usi
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The rockets produced initially for the manned program made unmanned launches less accident prone, allowing commercial use of satellites to be done with less risk of losing the payload, therefore making it easier to find investors. The benefits to the telecommunications industry alone have more than made up for the manned program.
I view the manned program as an end goal of its own. Like America's westward expansion, there are likely to be untold benefits that are not apparent from the start, except this time